


Fidelius

by tradescant (tofty)



Series: Fidelius [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-08-15
Updated: 2002-08-15
Packaged: 2017-10-15 09:35:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofty/pseuds/tradescant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry, all at sea and out in the cold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fidelius

_"You're like one of those clipper ship captains. You're married to the sea."  
"Yes, that's true. But I've been out to sea for a long time."_

 _\--from Rushmore  
_  
:::

Eighteen steps to cross the width of the cottage. Ten to cross the length. From the toilet to the closet, eight. From the closet to the door, twelve. From the door to the rocky beach, twenty-seven. From the beach to the sea, variable. Which is frustrating.

Harry's life is packed away into this tiny cottage, ringed round by wards and spells, protected and protected again, layer on layer. The heavy magic muffles his gestures and dulls his senses and puts a barrier between him and everything he touches--as though he's living his life covered by a blanket, with that covered over by his Invisibility Cloak. He's already decided that the Cloak is going to Ron, assuming he ever sees Ron again, because after eight months all the adventure has gone out of invisibility. He thinks back to First Year, Christmastime, and can't remember why he thought invisibility was fun; mostly now he's just afraid that he might never be visible again.

Two thousand, four hundred twenty-six steps to the village where he does his shopping. He lifts the spells covering him for a few minutes at a stretch, participates in casual conversations unremembered by anyone but him, again and again, the same Confunded people and the same questions. Here on holiday, yes. I just got a little bored and offered to walk in to buy some things we need.

When he casts off the Charm, at the greengrocer's or the chemist's or the tiny village bookshop, he's reminded of that feeling, coming off gillyweed as he pushed himself, gasping and close to drowning, to the surface of the icy Hogwarts lake in Fourth Year, of being unable to breathe and unable to think of anything beyond surviving for a few minutes to the surface; then the struggle to shore, too exhausted to feel relief or do anything more than to gasp that sweet cold air. As burdened as he feels by Fidelius, he feels worse when he lifts it. The struggle to slough it off for even a few minutes often renders him useless for the rest of the day.

So Harry plans his days carefully, for a minimum of contact with the world. Easier that way, and besides, that's the point of the Charm in the first place, to keep him hidden and out of the way while the messy cleanup is underway, for now obeying the Order's wishes. He counts the steps from one place to another, plots his position and his destinations and navigates carefully between them. Compass, chronometer, cross-staff. Step. Step. Step. He staves off the nightmares by meticulously tacking around them.

:::

Six steps from his chair to the front door, and Harry is waiting outside as Snape struggles through the wards and the traps and the frozen misting twilight up the walk to the doorstep, only his pale face (bleached winter-white by the harsh sea air) clearly visible against the black stone walk, the bleak shoreline, the gunmetal-grey sea. It is February and North, so damp and cold that even Hedwig prefers being indoors to flying free, and just in the couple of minutes he's facing into the wind, his lips turn numb and his eyes start to water and his shirt and hair are wet through, not quite dripping. He's shivering with cold, or probably not just cold, but he can't tell the difference as Snape moves forward, half walking and half propelled by wind, and he's talking before Snape is halfway up the walk (twenty-three steps, because his legs are somewhat longer than Harry's).

"You're late. Sir."

Snape's face settles into its famous sneer, his low voice slightly distorted by the weather and the edge of wary hostility between them. "Potter, I had detention to dole out. You don't really think you're my only respons--"

But Harry's mouth is already against Snape's, tongue inside his mouth licking up the last of that unpalatable word, a hand at his collar and the other in a fist against the nape of Snape's neck, and Snape stops trying to finish the sentence after the first couple of seconds, and the words are forgotten after a moment as he presses Harry back through the doorway. Knees knocking together as he kicks the door shut, elbows nearly upsetting Hedwig's cage between door and window, and she ruffles her feathers and hoots grumpily at Harry. Harry isn't listening to anything but the rush of blood (like the hollow wet moan of an empty shell), though, as it flows out of his head and into his cock, the cock that Snape is flexing his upper thigh against, and he isn't thinking about anything at all. Just savoring the scrape of damp cloth against bare skin, the slick inside of a mouth and the rougher edge of tongue, the sensation of something actually making contact with his body, so starved for tactile sensation.

Strands of black hair salt-smelling and damp across his face as their cold, clammy bodies gradually warm from the inside out, from the mouth down, from the cock up, become wet and sticky with something besides weather and sea spray. Harry lets out a rasping moan as Snape's long fingers wrap around him, press into his body, voice uncertain and creaking from lust and lack of use, and he squeezes his eyes shut to relieve the pressure behind his eyes when Snape drops to his knees and sucks strongly on Harry's cock, teeth pressing gently down its length and tongue rubbing against the underside, and Harry is so rapt in these sensations that he doesn't even really realize he's going to come until it's too late to try and stop it happening, and his limbs are trembling and Snape pulls his mouth up to the tip of Harry's cock to catch it all and hold it in his mouth, some for lubrication and some, after a moment, to feed back to Harry on the tip of his tongue.

And then Harry's flat on his back on the table, legs around Snape's waist, hands on his own cock, being fucked raw by his Potions Master. He closes his eyes to savor the burning that increases with each thrust, the agonized pleasure that just now compensates for the muffled, softened numb feeling of the wood just barely not against his back, burning that, if he's lucky, he'll feel for hours or even days, or maybe that's just a phantom pain, pulled from his memory, a shark trapped in the shallows waiting to bite at his ankles, but either way, he doesn't care because memory or real, the pain briefly connects him to the world again, and if he can also remember coming again, shouting, with Snape still screwing him mercilessly, then so much the better. Next, he's floating, free to concentrate more sharply on the cock invading him, and on the warmth of Snape's hand as it clutches at his hip, on the look in Snape's eyes, on the curve of Snape's thin lips and Snape's open mouth as it reaches for his, of Snape looming over and tucked under and slamming against him, Snape's bowed back as he groans through gritted teeth in his own climax, Snape.

Afterwards, they address practical matters sitting in front of the fire, which heats one side almost unbearably and leaves the other a little chilled. When the first and most important questions are asked and answered ( _I don't know, Potter, probably not before Spring, Lucius Malfoy still hasn't been located_ ) and his prep has been handed over for return to Hogwarts, Harry leans quietly back on his hands and ignores the rest--he'll look through the new prep and notes and letters later, at his leisure--and lets his attention wander.

(When he thinks about it, which is often, he doesn't remember that they ever told him this part when they told him that the spell was for his protection, and that it was only temporary. They never said, _Harry, only your Secret-Keeper will be able to touch you properly_ , and Harry wouldn't have forgotten that, because he hasn't forgotten anything about that day, the horror he felt on being told that he would have to spend time in isolation, that his reward for finally ridding the world of Voldemort would be an Order of Merlin, the everlasting adulation of thousands of wizarding folk all over the world, and enforced near-solitude for months on end. How close they came to having to restrain him when the Charm was cast, only Remus's calm, measured voice snapping him out back into rational thought. Only for a few months, Harry told himself as he felt the first waves of magic swelling and lapping around his ankles, and he allowed it to pour over him. And then a few stretched into eight, and Harry doesn't remember any warnings at all, and is it any wonder? That sometime in the fifth month, when he discovered by an accidental touch that his Potions Master possessed the ability to breach the complicated spellwork covering him, that that became the most important--on some days, the only important--part of his life, and days like this became the only days he ever looks forward to, because he can't even think far enough ahead to imagine when his life won't be like this any more.)

:::

Finally, four steps to the window, and Harry, wrapped in blankets of magic and wool, rubs a clear spot into the condensation with his palm and stares out at the blackness outside his door, at Hedwig as she wheels above the sea, at Snape's retreating back as he leaves the warming light of the cottage windows, and then at nothing at all after he Disapparates by the water, salt water lapping over his boots and white noise even with the window closed. Touches his forehead to the pane, and the layered magic protects his scar from the worst of its fierce cold, although he's shivering again, just a little.

How many steps to Spring? If he started walking now, where would he meet it?


End file.
